Time
by Umbra viridis -tco
Summary: There is a beast walking inside of Dean. It's not him, but it's loud and it makes his thoughts go awry, it makes him afraid of his own hands. And twenty-five days ago, Castiel touched his hand and condemned him in seven words.


It's been twenty-five days since he touched your hand, and startled, you let him. You don't think about it all that much, but the rabid beast living inside of you does. It howls at him, at you, and you bark back in his and self-defense, you try to put it back into its place. But its leash has been cut off the moment you've picked the blade and had it poison you with its power and there's no use to your commands anymore – the beast's place is anywhere it wants now. It walks freely all around, the festering wound on your arm is the spot of comfort where it merely sleeps, not obediently stays as you'd at first believe.

Twenty-five days ago it was found and condemned. Your arm and your wrist were grabbed and not a breath of a cover kept you and him separated. He held your skin bare in a whole new intensity of expansion to his touch and you were counting the seconds as they passed, you were counting the syllables of his words as they fell, every single one coming a graceless slap to your exposed face. _What have you done_ – four. _Damn it, Dean_– three. And you suppose that yeah, this kind of seven would sum up your relationship with that particular divine. Seven seconds of his fingers burning you up like fever, burning the monster like holy water, until you yanked your skin and shame away from those iron hands that could crush cities and demons and bones with their grip. And the thing ripping through your flesh in scarlets and alien lines told you something new: _he can't, not anymore_. _His time is countable, his breaths numbered. If you held him down by his throat, you could squeeze it until his air and blood would gurgle, until his death would rattle with finality and pleasant warmth around your palm_.

It's a new way for you to think of him becoming undone and losing his breath through the doing of your hand, impossibly different from the one you've used to entertain yourself with for all this time. It repels you.

But the poisoned scar and the animal it feeds made you consider it for twenty-five days. So you tried to fight fire with fire and you tried so hard it all became a juxtaposition of all things wrong and mad. In the showers that made you feel even more filthy, you would fuck yourself into blankness, thinking about him falling apart inside of you, so obscenely and beautifully pleasure-spent into exhaustion, his throat singing elegies as he would sink himself into your chest; or you would fuck yourself out of nowhere, eyes closed, but seeing him mewl in hopeless, sad pain, hands clutching at you for the last time as you'd tear your bride of a blade through him whole, you'd see through his agony to the end, until the evil that haunts you would be sated, until you'd cut away the last gold thread linking you to salvation. He is the only good thing you have. It makes you think you are never really free until everything is gone, good and bad. But freedom is a luxury you never get to afford. There are always things to pay for first. You don't have to luxury to kill, you don't have the luxury to love him, either. For twenty-five days now you are so fucking afraid of both.

You _don't_ want him to touch you for the first time. You just don't know if it will trigger you to mindlessly kiss and feel him against you stupid while **you**'re still here, or will it trigger the hell-hound marring your mind with black smoke to bite and maul him until blood paints you red and lovely like a Chinese bride.

And yet, he comes. A year and a something and a while and twenty-five days too late and he hangs himself limp in your arms as if you were a cross. He offers you the hug you gave him then, the one you can't have now after letting the beast roam, after those twenty-five days. You look away. You're so afraid of touching him, you no longer know the intentions of your hands – just like he hadn't known that one time, whether he'll kill you with his hand or lay your wounds to rest. And if you still don't know if you were enough to break the connection then, how can you be sure you are enough to keep it then?

You _can't_. So you don't touch him.

After not seeing or touching you for twenty-five days, his body makes a twitch from which you know, after all those broken people you've held, he is going to sob. And he does. He bleeds tears on you, they pull you down and they feel too heavy to bear and stand them without breaking into half. Your body vibrates with his little shaking, it's so loud it makes you go deaf. The only thing you still hear is his body begging you to_something_. _To stop? To try?_ You don't know, you just can't catch it out. _Why, Dean?_ Or is it _Goodbye, Dean_ he's saying? Really, you've got no idea. Your ideas are pretty limited after those twenty-five days. The thing is howling too loud. Both things – the parasite and your heart. When he touches you they suffer the same. There is too much of his body within your confused reach. You don't know what to do with it, but you know you'll be thinking about it for the remaining time.

There's very little left of it, you think. That's the only comfort. The coin is already in the air. It's either you or the rabid dog. It's going to bite its way out of your chest, it will eat your heart. It will eat his too with that jawbone old as time when the new devil calls.

It's too loud, too long, too late. There is only one thing left that you want: for him, for you, for your hands, for his hands, for time and the world to be over.

And for this you are now waiting. _Means to an end_ – you said twenty-five days ago. You pray to it every night: _end, just come. It's time_.


End file.
